Toward Ontology-Based Frameworks for Knowledge-Acquisition Tools
چکیده
One of the strongest limitations of knowledge-acquisition metatools—tools that automate the development of knowledge-acquisition tools—is that the interface-design knowledge employed by such metatools to produce domain-specific knowledge-acquisition tools is not explicit and cannot be used by other metatools. Therefore, the usefulness of a metatool is restricted to its own implementation environment. A possible solution to this problem is the definition of a shareable ontology of knowledge-acquisition tools that represents explicitly the relevant knowledge of tool design and development. We take the position that the design of knowledge-acquisition tools is similar to the design of user interfaces, and that an ontology of knowledge-acquisition tools is a special case of an interface ontology. We propose that a shareable interface ontology can be defined by analyzing interface ontologies used in model-based user-interface development systems, and by resolving differences and conflicts among the ontologies—a process called model alignment. We present the initial results of a model alignment for the interface ontologies of two user-interface development systems: SHELTER and Mecano. We also show how the resulting shareable interface ontology underpins a framework in which each system can be applied to different parts of the process of generating a single, domain-specific knowledge-acquisition tool, thus creating a generation of metatools useful across multiple implementation environments. 1. KNOWLEDGE-ACQUISITION TOOLS AS INTERFACES The traditional view of knowledge-acquisition tools is that of independent systems that form part of the development cycle of a knowledge-based system. From that view, it follows that the design of a knowledge-acquisition tool is normally tied up to the design of a single knowledge-based system, or in the best case, a restricted class of knowledge-based systems. As a consequence, the development of a domain-specific knowledge-acquisition tool is an important resource-consuming task that results in a system that has a very limited applicability and a very short life span. One successful approach to alleviate the burden of developing knowledge-acquisition tools is the use of metatools such as PROTÉGÉ-I [Musen, 1989] and DOTS [Eriksson, 1993b]. Metatools are able to generate knowledge-acquisition tools from high-level specifications, thus allowing knowledge engineers to construct tools by manipulating abstract design objects. For example, PROTÉGÉ-I produces automatically a tool from a specification of a problem-solving method (skeletal-plan refinement), and DOTS provides a small number of primitives that can be used to build entire tools. Although the savings in resources provided by metatools is significant, the usefulness of such tools is restricted to their own development environment. That is, a system like PROTÉGÉ-I provides no help to a developer of a knowledge-acquisition tool with a different problem-solving specification (i.e., different from skeletal-plan refinement). Reuse is stymied even just by moving to a different window system in which the tool must be implemented. This is the direct result of